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The dark streaks in the 75-million-year-old rock that looked like feathers were joked about in the field, but it soon became clear to paleontologists that it was a significant find. The discovery of three fossils in Alberta, revealed Thursday, are the first feathered dinosaur specimens to be found in the Western Hemisphere. They show that ornithomimid dinosaurs, which resemble ostriches, had feathers.

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“Dinner will be delayed. We have a mother bear and three cubs on the shoreline. Starboard.” The announcement from Capt. Steve Kempton on the MV Swell interrupted some passengers just about to settle in for a pre-dinner nap, while others enjoyed a book and the sublime scenery viewed from the top deck’s coveted couch. […]

Calgary may still be considered a car-centric city, but newly released data suggests a majority of commuters opt for hopping on a bus or train over getting behind the wheel for their daily downtown commute.

Nearly 1,300 people slept at the Calgary Drop-In Centre on Sunday night, some on mats placed in the overcapacity homeless shelter’s cafeteria and first floor lobby as winter weather hit the city. The homeless shelter has been setting up an additional 170 mats in its cafeteria since Oct. 15, as part of a winter emergency program, but as the mercury dropped on Sunday evening, those additional beds weren’t enough.

"It's definitely a lot colder today than it was yesterday and it's going to stay that way for the better part of the week," said Jessie Wager, a lead meteorologist with Environment Canada, on Sunday.
Calgary police responded to 62 collisions, including five injury collisions, between 12:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. Sunday.

The Tory cabinet has declared a disaster for Alberta’s agricultural producers because of frost and snow, including September’s freak snowfall. The order in council passed by cabinet Thursday declares an “agricultural economic hardship disaster” stemming from “extreme weather conditions with early snowfall and frost leading to damaged crops throughout the province.”

An early November snowfall caused power outages across southern Alberta, trapped hikers on Mount Yamnuska and kept roads crews and police busy over the weekend. Calgary and many surrounding areas were placed under a snowfall warning on Saturday and by the time Calgary’s warning was lifted midday Sunday, about 12 to 15 centimetres of snow had fallen across the city, said Environment Canada meteorologist Kyle Fougere.

City crews have started pruning trees across Calgary in an attempt to save the severely damaged urban forest following September’s freak snowstorm. “We estimate that of the 500,000 public trees, there’s about 50 per cent with some kind of damage,” Nico Bernard, with the city’s parks department, told reporters Friday.

Roughly one million trees — half the urban canopy — were damaged or destroyed in the early September snowstorm. Parks managers updated council Monday on the toll of what they now call “Calgary tree disaster of 2014” — one that cut a far broader swath throughout all Calgary communities than last summer’s flood, and prompted more 311 hotline calls.

The city has now collected 14 million kilograms of tree debris — enough to fill McMahon football stadium 20 metres deep — as it continues cleaning up communities hit hard by a freak snowstorm in September. Over the last three weeks, crews have cleared 97 communities — representing about 43 per cent of the city — and aims to move into another 34 neighbourhoods this weekend. Cleanup is not expected to be complete until mid-November.

According to recent statistics, the Okanagan real estate market is emerging from the depths of its recessionary funk. A midsummer report from the B.C. Real Estate Association opined that parts of the Okanagan might be “flirting with being a seller’s market” — words that haven’t been heard since 2007. In August, the Okanagan reported the largest year-over-year sales gain in all of B.C., at 23 per cent.

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